


If I Cannot Move Heaven

by selahexanimo



Category: Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 16:26:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1096096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/selahexanimo/pseuds/selahexanimo
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The gods do not play fair with either their champions or their enemies. Ganondorf Dragmire tires of Their abuse. The King of Hyrule cannot imagine a world without it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If I Cannot Move Heaven

**Author's Note:**

  * For [deads](https://archiveofourown.org/users/deads/gifts).



> The title is taken from The Aeneid, Book VII.312: "If I cannot move heaven, I will raise hell."

I

Ganondorf Dragmire awakes in darkness.

The sea entombs him. He tastes its brine in the stale air of his tower, feels the crush of it weighing down the magical seal that keeps the tower from flooding. He cannot walk because he has slept so long that old age has begun to eat at his bones. His magic is brittle, its language sluggish and strange in his mouth, but he manages a spell, that carries him to the top of the tower. The sea ripples, blue-veined and glassy, against the walls of the seal. He crouches on hands and knees, eyes blurred with rheum; he stares into the water and chokes out a curse.

This is the game that the gods play. They could not take Hyrule from him by means of a hero, so They drowned the land. It is easier, perhaps, to destroy than to seek salvation.

Ganondorf screams at Them (but of course They are not listening; no god has never listened to a Gerudo voice, except to stifle it—with Their chosen children, Their blessed blades). He screams and screams until the spittle flies from his mouth and his chest heaves.

“I promise You,” he rasps, “I am not done.”

He does not know how long it is before he drags himself to his feet, how long he stands spitting out the ancient language, sending curse after curse flying at the seal, before his magic reawakens, rich and sweet and pulsing through his brain, his limbs, his fingers. He leaves for Hyrule Castle, which he has glimpsed from his tower, but a seal stops him on the bridge; it sends lightning through him when he strikes it with his fist.

He returns to the tower, words of magic burning in his mouth.

oOo

Three voices whisper in the back of King Daphnes’s mind. The voices are gentle, tangled up in each other like vines.

_It is time to wake, my child. It is time. It is time._

The King of Hyrule is old, tired. His mind clings to warm sleep. He wishes the voices would be silent; he swims back down into his dream. (The Great Hall, mantled in soft light. He dances with his daughter. She wears a gown of rosy silk, white gloves, and a winged diadem of gold; her sun-kissed hair spills to her waist. “You look all of twelve,” he says, laughing. She gives him a half smile.

“I _am_ twelve, Daddy. Just today. Or did you forget—?”

Daphnes touches rough lips to her forehead; he is not used to gestures of affection, but today is a special day, Zelda’s birthday, his favorite day. “I am your papa,” he says. “Papas never like to remember their girls are growing up.”)

But still the voices call, nudging, nudging, until Daphnes cannot hold on to the dream anymore. He wakes—and this is when he feels the emptiness, an absence he has never felt before.

“What has happened?” he breathes.

 _The Gerudo has thwarted the seal_ , the voices murmur. _He has escaped to the world above. Child—dear child. Remember your promise to us._

Memories come crashing back, until Daphnes is electric with them. His dreams returns, but at a slant: the soft light filling the Great Hall has gone as dark and thick as blood; rain roars outside. His daughter trembles beside him. “Take this piece of the Triforce.” Daphnes pushes a small, leather bag into her hands. “Take it and never lose it. Guard it with your _life_. It will be the only way to defeat the tyrant, later on, and it will be our undoing if he steals it.”

She stares at him. “But we are undone.” Her voice is dull with disbelief. “The hero did not come.”

He presses her hand, so hard she winces to feel the sharp edge of Wisdom cutting through the leather bag into her palm. “He will come,” Daphnes promises. “I will find him. Now go.”

He pushes her from him. She stumbles.

“You won’t find him, will you?” she whispers. “Not while I am alive. Daddy. Daddy, _please_ —”

“Go,” he says. “Go before you drown.” He stares her down, until she shrinks back and runs. When she vanishes, his body goes weak; he sinks to the floor and lies with his face pressed to the cold stones, like a supplicant.

This is not what a man does, he thinks, not how a father treats his only child. He does not leave her with only a piece of her salvation, to survive a storm of rain not meant to be survived, with only a handful of servants. But he has made his bargain with the goddesses. He is not meant to be anyone’s hero (not even his daughter’s)—he is meant to find him.

But this does not erase the king’s desire—not then, as Hyrule flooded and his daughter fled, and not now that he has awoken.

“Did she live?” he asks the three whispering voices. “Have I woken in time?”

 _Your daughter is dead_ , the voices answer. _But her piece of the Triforce is still safe._

He feels for his own piece of Wisdom, clenches it in his fist, feels its edge cut his hand. _She is dead._ So casually spoken, as if Zelda had not mattered. _But her piece of the Triforce is still safe._

Hot rage bursts through him in a boiling geyser. He turns it upon the emptiness—the absence—he turns it where it will inflict the most hurt and do the most good.

II

Ganondorf Dragmire is thinking of his sisters when he takes the Forsaken Fortress for himself.

The portal he shapes, down in the black tower, carries him to the halls of a island stronghold that may have once been Gerudo Fortress or the Spirit Temple. The isle must have some significance—it called to his magic, and his magic brought him to it. But time and the sea have so eroded the structure that Ganondorf cannot make out what it once might have been.

The fortress is held by a band of pirates, men and women in stone masks with broadswords slung across their backs and treasure ornamenting every arm and leg and finger and toe. They panic, when Ganondorf arrives among them; they attack, and he subdues them with blasts of magic.

His magic is gluey with disuse, temperamental (and still shackled; he feels the goddesses’ curse upon him like an iron fetter). It smashes some of the pirates to dust, knocks others unconscious. He strips the unconscious women of their masks, looking for his sisters, his aunts, his cousins, his nieces. Looking, when he shocks them awake, for lion’s hide yellow eyes, for signs of recognition. But they do not know him. If Gerudo blood once flowed through their veins, it has bled out; if Gerudo memories once filled their minds, they have been corrupted. The wizard flings the stone-masked pirates into the sea with a savage crack of magic.

A few escape; he sees them dragging at the chains of a giant bird in a stone helmet, urging it up from its nest, screaming at it to _attack_ , _attack_. The bird screeches and shakes at the chain; Ganondorf can see where the manacles have skinned its neck raw and bloody, can see where the pirates have stripped the bird of plumage in search of Golden Feathers. He steps where the monstrous bird can see him; it turns its stone helmet toward him and screams.

He breaks the manacle with a single word. The bird beats into the sky and turns on the pirates.

The remaining pirates flee for their ship, but the bird tears the ship to pieces. Ganondorf calls, “Leave me the captain’s cabin, O king of birds,” letting magic carry his voice. The bird listens. When it has finished, the cabin and stern list intact among the wreckage. Ganondorf takes it for his aerie.

The bird lands and regards the wizard with hot, gold eyes. Ganondorf says, “Go, or stay. Whatever you will.”

It stays.

It is with contempt that Ganondorf hurls the bodies of the pirates into the water, these women who had not known him as their brother, their son, their father. The goddesses had chosen who They would save from the flood, and who They would not. They have ensured that Ganondorf is the last of his people. He is more kin with Farore’s pestilent children—the green and blue Bokoblins poling their rafts to the doors of his fortress; the Moblins with their slack grins, staring eyes, and rattling skull necklaces; the Miniblins crawling from the stones with tridents, their faces split with canine smiles. Perhaps they sense in Ganondorf a fellow outcast, as loathed by Farore as they are. Perhaps their memories are long, and they know him for their master.

He takes them, whatever the reason they come.

He rebuilds the fortress and plunges it into night (for the sun hurts his eyes; he has slept too long and his eyes are as brittle as his magic, slow to mend). When this is finished, he turns his energies to the next task: finding the Triforce.

The goddesses have robbed him of his people, so he will rob them of Their country. Hyrule is not wholly lost beneath the sea. With the right magic, he can raise it.

He looks for Princess Zelda and her piece of the Triforce. He sends the giant bird in search of her. He need only seek the princess; when he finds her, the hero, bearing Courage, will follow.

The Helmaroc King brings him back girl after disappointing girl. Ganondorf seizes their wrists, looks at the backs and palms of their hands as they cringe and wail, but his Triforce does not resonate; the girls are always the wrong one. He does not bother to send them home. Let them rot; the gods have done worse things.

A boy, dressed in green and carrying a sword, comes to rescue the third girl the Helmaroc king brings to Ganondorf. The wizard’s interest is roused. This boy looks very much like the hero, but his sword is mere steel, battered and unblessed; his clothes are old, someone else’s. It is as if this boy plays a game whose rules he does not understand. Unfortunate child. Ganondorf’s Power does not resonate; he orders the bird to throw the boy into the sea.

oOo

And this is how Daphnes Nohansen Hyrule finds his surrogate hero: unconscious in the water, too brave and too stupid for his own good.

The goddesses place Daphnes’s spirit in a red boat, with a lion’s head prow and no sail. They rechristen him King of the Red Lions; They whisper in Their three, tangled voices, _find the hero, my son_. “Of course,” the King says. He rides the swells They send to push him on his way.

He makes his slow, creaking way across the Great Sea, guided by helpful fairies, listening to the Fishmen and the Rito. He feels nothing, as a boat—not the plash of water against his sides, not the wind teasing his lion’s snarl, not the heartsickness of seeing what the goddesses—no, what _Ganondorf_ —have done to Hyrule: her mountain peaks turned to insignificant islands, the sun a white, heatless disc above her drowned body.

The swells carry him to the Forsaken Fortress. Days later, he watches the Helmaroc King fling a brave, stupid boy into the sea. The goddesses, the King thinks, are watching over them both.

He rescues the boy and rides the swells to the safety of a distant island. This boy is not the hero—he is just a child of age to wear the hero’s green—but he will work for the King’s purposes. The King has learned enough from the creatures of the sea and air to understand what drives this boy, and so he says, when the boy has awakened, “There is only one way to rescue your sister from that fortress, and you must listen to me if you wish to save her.” What he says is true, in its way—there is only one way to defeat Ganondorf, and it is to use the Master Sword that sleeps in Hyrule—the sword that both holds the tyrant in check and will be his doom.

The King even hopes that he and boy can save the sister (may the goddesses have mercy). But the sister is not the point. The King does not share this detail with the boy (no more than he reveals his true identity; that must wait). He does not tell the boy that even if his sister dies, he must continue fighting.

(It is the sister, among other things, that keep this brave, stupid child from being a hero. The sister is a distraction, one delicate piece in a more important whole. A hero’s love must be inclusive; he must love something far bigger than himself and his loved ones. He must have the courage to fight even when his loved ones perish. This is why the King cannot be a hero; it is selfish love that drives him. His daughter is dead, and he needs the tyrant to pay for her death.)

The King drives the boy as a gale drives the sea—swiftly, implacably. They do not have time for anything but this quest.

The boy is clumsy and slow—still so much a child; the King cannot imagine that any hero could have been this young, this vulnerable—but at last he proves himself worthy of the sacred blade. The boy draws it from its pedestal down in Hyrule—and this is when the world changes. The King can see it, in the way the daylight shortens and the patterns of the gulls change—in the way that Farore’s pestilent children grow fiercer and bolder.

The sword is no longer holding back the tyrant’s power. But the King can sense no magic—no blessing—in it.

“What has happened to the sword?” he cries, to the goddesses, as the boy slumbers, one night, and a steady wind pushes them north, toward the Forsaken Fortress. “Why does it still sleep?”

The goddesses do not answer. (He imagines Them silent upon Their thrones, tears dripping down Their sunken cheeks. It was Their tears that drowned Hyrule. And still They weep, these hundred, hundred years later.) But the King thinks he knows what has happened. He has heard rumors of temples smashed and cursed, their guardian sages slaughtered while they prayed. The tyrant seeks to destroy the power of the blade. Perhaps he has already destroyed it.

“Do not let this be,” the King says into the darkness. “Bless the blade, goddesses. Show us mercy.”

He is carrying the boy to certain death, for if the blade still sleeps by the time they have arrived in the Forsaken Fortress, what chance do they have against the tyrant and his reawakened power? But they must try. They must cut down the tyrant before he unleashes his magic upon the Great Sea.

(They must cut the tyrant down, regardless, this monster who stole Daphnes’s daughter from him.)

A pair of gulls drift above the King, shadows against the stars. “Help us,” he whispers to them. “The gods are not listening.”

III

Ganondorf listens to the Helmaroc King’s last, long screech, as the boy’s sword slices through its crest, and the bird dies.

There is chance, the wizard thinks, that he has miscalculated. This boy is resilient. Clever. Very like a hero, even if the fact he has made it so far is the result of good luck and divine mercy.

He wants to see this boy up close, not dangling from a bird’s beak but standing on his feet. He wants to see this child who managed to touch the sacred blade without being burned, who infiltrated Ganondorf’s fortress and killed the Helmaroc King. He wants to see the child who has broken the seal on his power.

And yes -- the boy is _very much_ a child, scowling up at Ganondorf from behind his shield, the Master Sword raised in his fist like an oversized toy. The wizard is almost sad to see how much faith the child has in the blade (mere steel, gleaming with reflected torchlight. Ganondorf has killed the sages whose prayers fed it power; it is useless, now). The wizard almost remembers being so young, so assured. “You are still playing games, I see,” he says to the boy. “Games only goddesses and powerless kings know how to play.”

The boy’s hard expression flickers at “powerless kings,” momentarily confused— _yes_ , Ganondorf thinks and does not say. _I know the man with whom you travel, boy, even if he does not deign to trust you with that knowledge._

The boy charges Ganondorf. The wizard knocks him down and draws his sword. The boy recoils.

“Your blade is dead,” Ganondorf tells him. “You cannot hurt me with it. I am sorry your companion made you think that you could.”

And he is sorry, in his way. The Royal Family is always playing games, telling half-truths, sacrificing their pawns without a second thought. That is what it means to be Hylian and preferred by the goddesses: it is to be a bastard and never know it.

The girl comes from nowhere. She is tiny, dark, and sinewy, with a fierce smile; she wears pirate’s clothes and a dagger thrust through her belt. She winks at the boy. “I’ll distract him,” she calls. “Get moving, kid!” She is upon Ganondorf in the next moment, moving like a Miniblin. But Ganondorf manages to catch her; he seizes her by the throat, and she scrabbles at his hands, eyes popping, face turning purple.

“You—” he begins—and that is when he feels a surge. His hand blazes; he realizes his piece of the Triforce is resonating. He gapes at the girl (her eyes have rolled up, her hands going slack). A shard of triangular gold dangles from a cord around her throat; the shard is glowing, floating up before his astonished eyes.

Wisdom. _Wisdom_ dangles from around this girl’s neck, which can only mean that Ganondorf has found her. The princess. _Zelda_.

He has enough time to think, _you are not playing fair, goddesses; you sent the hero first, and sent the princess after him_ —when someone snatches the pirate girl away. Ganondorf spins. The boy, too, has vanished. He turns to the window, catches a brief glimpse of a pair of Rito hurtling into the distance with the children in tow. Seagulls follows after them.

And then a red dragon fills the window. Their eyes meet.

“Valoo,” says Ganondorf, speaking the name of the Ritos' guardian in an ancient tongue.

The dragon opens its mouth and roars fire.

The flames swallow Ganondorf; he feels them churning through him. There is fire in his mouth, in his lungs. He breathes it in, deep, as if it is the sweetest fragrance; he screams, “You cannot kill me with fire, Valoo.”

But death is not the point. The wizard cannot sense the princess, the boy, or the King of Hyrule’s spirit. When he struggles from the flames, they are gone.

His hand simmers with the memory of Wisdom.

oOo

The King has had his suspicions about the pirate girl.

His suspicions begin when he contacts the boy through a pirate charm that the boy carries. The King recognizes the charm as his own creation, shaped from a Gossip Stone; when he asks the boy about it, the boy tells him that a pirate girl had given it to him.

The stone is a relic of the Royal Family; the King cannot fathom how it has come into the possession of a pirate girl. He wonders who she stole it from. Or perhaps—more aptly—who gave it to her.

He gazes at her, now, slumped against the stern, the triangle of gold swaying against her chest. There is a piece missing from the triangle, in the exact shape of his own piece of Wisdom. And in that instant, he knows this pirate girl as a descendent of his bloodline.

Knows her for his daughter’s child.

He flees the Forsaken Fortress with the wind in his sails, the children crouched on his deck. He takes them to the Tower of the Gods, and the portal that will return them to Hyrule.

The pirate girl awakens, when they are in Hyrule, and the King orders the boy to lead her to the secret chamber that once housed the Master Sword. He heaves his spirit from the boat and returns to his own body. The children are a while in coming. When the King looks for them using the pirate charm, he sees the boy gazing, stunned, at the lifeless boat—hears the boy calling, softly: “King? King of the Red Lions?”

The boy and the pirate girl descend at last. When they are gathered in the room, standing before him, the King tells them, at last, who he is.

He turns to the pirate girl. “Your necklace,” he says, “is but one piece of your inheritance. The other piece I have kept with me. The other piece I gave to your… mother.”

“Grandmother,” the girl corrects, though her tone restrained, not so brash. “Great-great-great… I don’t know how far back.”

The King pauses. “… Yes,” he says. “Yes.”

He reaches into his robe and draws forth his piece of the Triforce. It glitters on his palm, a nugget of gold, and when it senses the pirate girl’s piece, it begins to hum. He reaches out a hand, and the pirate girl’s Wisdom lifts from around her neck.

The three of them watch the two pieces meet in a flash of light.

A net of brilliance bursts from the completed triangle and encases the pirate girl. She steps back with a gasp—and then falls silent.

Daphnes catches his breath. His chest tightens. He wishes, for one wild heartbeat, that his spirit was still inside of the boat, to keep him from trembling so, to stop him choking with anticipation.

The light dims, vanishes. And there, before him, stands his daughter.

Except she is not quite Princess Zelda, as Daphnes remembers her—she is still the pirate girl: younger, black-eyed and scarred, her arms powerful, her skin bronzed. But her hair is loose, as Zelda’s had been the night of her birthday; she wears the winged diadem, the rose silk gown. The gloves do not look right on her broad, strong hands; one smolders, dangerously, with the light of the Triforce.

“Zelda,” Daphnes whispers. “Zelda—my Zelda—my child.”

She stares at her hand in shock. When she meets the King’s gaze, her eyes are confused.

“You must stay here,” says Daphnes. “The tyrant does not know of this chamber; you will be safe here.”

His daughter would have been safe here. Had he begged the goddesses to leave her in this chamber in his place, he would not now live with the knowledge that she had died, while he had not—that she had turned to piracy upon the open sea while he had slept like some hero of old. But he had not thought of this, back then. He had only wanted Zelda to escape with her piece of the Triforce; he had wanted her to flee to the safety of the mountains. “Spare her,” he had gasped, as he had sunk to his knees before the altar of the goddesses, while outside the rain roared and Hyrule drowned. “Spare her, and I will serve You with my dying breath. Use me as You will to stop this evil. Only spare her. Spare my child.”

And yes, Zelda had lived to protect her piece of Wisdom. To bear a child. But Daphnes had woken centuries after she had died—and this, in the end, was what he had not wanted. He had never wanted to wake and discover his child dead.

He failed his daughter once, by driving her from Hyrule. He will not fail her again. He will keep her daughter—her great, great, impossibly great-granddaughter—safe.

“Hurry,” he says to the boy. “We must awaken the Master Sword.”

He starts to leave; the pirate girl grasps his hand. “You aren’t going to leave me,” she says, and her eyes are wide. Her eyes, the King notices, are the same shade as his daughter’s—a blue so deep they are almost black.

“You will be safe here,” he says. He gently pulls away.

“But I’ll be all right.” She reaches for her dagger, then realizes it is gone; she stares, bewildered, at her empty hand. “I’ll be all right up there with you. Let me help.” Her eyes dart to the boy. “Link. Let me help you.”

The boy looks at Daphnes. Daphnes shakes his head.

“No,” he says. “I will not allow it.”

He wonders, in the end, if he was wrong.

For though he and the boy awaken the Master Sword and piece together the shattered Triforce of Courage—and though, as the last piece of the Triforce slides into place, the goddesses mark the back of the boy’s hand with the sign that he is Their chosen hero, the Hero of the Winds—for all that they have done, is it not enough.

For when the King and the hero return to Hyrule, Zelda is gone.

IV

Ganondorf watches the princess sleep.

She is both so like and unlike the Zelda he knew. There is iron running through her, as powerfully as it ran through her foremother, but unlike that first Zelda, this child’s dreams are full of oceans—oceans as endless and empty as the desert. Ganondorf understands why her foremother fought, as she did, for Hyrule—green, verdant Hyrule, shaped between Din’s flaming hands, peopled by the children of Farore’s womb, consecrated by the sacred laws of Nayru. He himself had fought to own that same, blessed country. He himself fights for it still.

He does not understand why this Zelda—this sea rat, this child of the ocean—opposes him. The gods have given her nothing but a briny wasteland. Only Ganondorf can give her a Hyrule worth protecting.

The hero, too, confounds him. “Are you still playing the goddesses’ games, child?” he calls, as he listens to the boy sloshing through the still pool that surrounds Zelda’s curtained bed. “The gods have given you nothing but this endless sea.” He rises to regard the hero crouched in the water with his shield and sword raised. “They use you, as much as the King of Hyrule used you, and what for? The real wealth of this world is _Hyrule_ , boy. Not the sea. Not the islands. _Hyrule_.”

He pins the boy with a gimlet stare. Smiles. “Why do you fight? Your gods _destroyed_ you.”

The boy does not have an answer, but neither does he back down. The Master Sword hums with power; this time, the hero’s faith is not misplaced.

“I have been waiting for someone like you,” Ganondorf whispers. He begins to move around the bed, toward the boy, and with each step, he grows taller, his limbs thicker, his body broader. “A hero. Do not betray my expectations.”

His newly awakened magic burns through him, almost too strong to control. Ganondorf has hungered to use his Power as it was meant to be used—and finally, the chance has come. He has not fought a real hero since the last struck him down a hundred, hundred years ago. He has gone too long without a challenge.

“Fight me,” he bellows. “Show me that the gods have chosen well.”

This is one thing he can say for Them—They always choose their hero well.

The boy does not disappoint.

His sword is quicksilver and thunder, striking Ganondorf’s puppet forms, battering them until they shatter into splinters of blue and black-purple glass. The boy glistens with sweat, heaves air through his mouth, but he fights as if for vengeance. Ganondorf screams and howls in the clockwork voices of his marionettes; the pleasure of battle scorches him. This is what he is meant for—to face the goddesses through their chosen one, to beat them with the Power of Their own divine creation.

Except he is not beating Them. The boy is winning.

The last puppet explodes, and the boy flings himself down, to avoid the roiling smoke and chunks of glass and metal pelted across the room. “Truly,” Ganondorf calls, “you are the hero reborn.” He means every word. He has only fought one man as quick and clever and strong as this child, and that was a hundred, hundred years ago.

(He has missed this. Gods, he has missed this.)

Ganondorf roars a challenge down to the hero and catapults toward the tower roof; he catches a glimpse of the child following him.

The tower is the same as when Ganondorf first visited it—the glassy, blue-veined sea presses against the goddesses’s seal. Princess Zelda lies groaning upon the stones. “Soon,” Ganondorf says. “Soon I will give you and your hero something to fight for.” He has made up his mind—the moment the hero arrives, Ganondorf will summon all three pieces of the Triforce. It is time for Hyrule to rise again.

Ganondorf feels the boy’s Courage before he sees him—that rich, golden power that the wizard has only felt once before (a hundred, hundred years earlier, when he was a desert thief dressed in black armor, striding into the Sacred Realm, seizing the Triforce, feeling it shatter beneath his hands, Power branding itself into his flesh). The boy moves with caution—Ganondorf can hear the shuffle of his boots, his heavy, exhausted breathing.

“My country,” says Ganondorf (speaking to the children, the sea, and the goddesses beyond it), “lay within a vast desert.”

As vast a desert as this wasteland of water.

It is so silent up here. Ganondorf can almost imagine that he hears the voices of his sisters, the muttering of ghosts beyond the seal. The Gerudo had been powerful, cunning women -- but all of them weere cursed to dwell in the desert, to cook when the wind screamed hot, to freeze when the gale breathed cold.

“No matter when it came, the wind carried the same thing,” Ganondorf says. “Death. But the winds that blew across the green fields of Hyrule did not.”

He glances at the boy, who kneels beside the princess.

“I coveted that wind, I suppose,” he says.

He raises his hands, stares at the glowing Power seared there, and then he turns to the boy. The hero is white-faced, uncertain.

“Do not fear,” Ganondorf says. “I will not kill you. I merely have need of the power that dwells within you.”

He strikes, faster than the boy can see; the hero screams, and Ganondorf lifts him up. “Now!” he roars, “Let us put an end to that which binds us together.”

He watches as each piece of the Triforce breaks free and drifts together. “Gods!” he cries. “Hear that which I desire. Expose this land to the rays of the sun. Give Hyrule to _me_.”

The triangles coalesce into a single whole—and there, before him, is the Triforce.

He reaches out a hand. His fingers tremble. “Give me the back the kingdom You stole, O goddesses—” he whispers.

“But you, Gerudo,” says another voice, “are the thief.”

oOo

The tyrant pauses—but it is enough. The King of Hyrule touches the Triforce.

Ganondorf Dragmire’s face closes up. It is as if Power has sealed itself behind his eyes; he burns.

“Gods of the Triforce,” Daphnes calls. “Hear that which I desire. Hope! I desire hope for these children. Give them a future. Wash away this ancient land of Hyrule.”

No sword will hurt Ganondorf Dragmire as Daphnes wishes him to hurt. But Hyrule, drowning, will.

“This is your land.” Ganondorf’s voice is stifled. “And yet you consign it to the sea.”

“The goddesses sealed it away,” Daphnes retorts. “I am but Their steward; I but ensure Their commands are carried out.”

Ganondorf’s face twists. “No goddess commanded you to do this,” he spits.

“Not in words,” says Daphnes. “But by example.”

Ganondorf’s helpless rage will not bring Daphnes’s daughter back. But it soothes, in part, the vengeful hunger of the selfish love that scorches the King down into his marrow.

The seal above them cracks, and water begins to pour down onto the tower roof.

Ganondorf’s golden eyes flash upward, back down. He smiles, a wild, open smile. “Hope?” he shouts. “What hope is there for them? You have damned them as surely as you have damned yourself.”

“No,” says Daphnes. He looks at the children—Zelda, dragging herself to her feet, Link with sword at the ready. “No, Ganondorf. I damn you. May you drown with Hyrule.”

The Gerudo screams, unsheathes his swords. “Children,” calls Daphnes, though the water roars so loudly he is not sure if they hear him. “Do what you must.”

The Triforce floats from beneath his fingers, and he follows it; he has done what he could, and he can do no more. Zelda holds Link’s bow and quiver of Light Arrows; she throws back her head to follow the progress of the king.

She winks, and in that moment, she is so like his daughter that the King’s heart constricts.

He is leaving her to drown.

 _No_.

He is leaving her to be slain by the tyrant.

 _No_.

He has wished a future for her—for both of these children. He has served the goddesses well and wished upon the Triforce. The gods will listen.

The wall of water bursting down like a cataract blinds him. He catches the battle in bits and pieces—Light Arrows flashing, the Master Sword striking, Ganondorf, blades twisting, his face snarling with desperate rage.

It is not a long battle. Ganondorf screams, and through the white spray, Daphnes glimpses the tyrant on his knees, the Master Sword embedded in his skull. The Gerudo’s eyes roll up and fix on the King; his open, screaming mouth seems to smile, slow and lazy. And then his eyes shut. His body turns to stone.

The children have collapsed, when Daphnes returns to them; they are soaked and wild-eyed and panting. Zelda splashes to her feet, when the King approaches; she gasps, “It’s done.” Her eyes flash to the waterfalls roaring down every side of the seal, to the water swirling around her calves. “Hurry! We have to go.”

“Wait,” says Daphnes. “Listen to me.”

He has lived too long. He is tired. His life—or what is left of it—is here. Among the dead and drowned. There is no place for him in the world above.

“I have lived bound to Hyrule,” he says. “In that sense, I was the same as Ganondorf.”

“No.” This is Link, dragging at his hand. “You’re not the same.”

“Come with us,” Zelda urges. “Please.”

But Daphnes is tired. He asked the goddesses to ensure the future of these children. Not his own.

His selfish love is sated; his daughter is dead, her death avenged. He has nothing left to live for.

“Farewell,” he says. “I am sorry that this is the only world that your ancestors were able to leave you. Please. Forgive us.”

“Wait!” Zelda cries.

He touches their faces, then draws back. “Good-bye,” he says.

The white, churning water sweeps up their chests, past their chins, lifts them off their feet. They go under. The King watches the water carry them up. His own body is like stone, unmoving. Zelda reaches for him. He lifts his hand—but she is moving too fast to touch.

He watches them until they are pinpricks against the sun and sea.

For a while, he stands in the crushing silence, his robes filling with water, belling out as if with wind.

 _You have done well, my son,_  three tangled voices whisper, gentle and sad, soft in his ears.

“Hold by Your promise,” he says to them. “Let me go.”

The goddesses do not answer. But the King’s body feels different, his stony weight growing heavier, heavier. He crumples to his knees, shuts his eyes. Opens his mouth and breathes in the brine. Breathes in death.

V

Behind his eyelids, King Daphnes sees the Great Hall. It is dark and still, empty except for himself and his daughter.

“Dance with me a while longer,” he says. “Don’t leave me just yet.”


End file.
